Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. (Reviews).

Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. By David T. Courtwright (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. viii plus 277pp. $24.95).

On page 3 of Forces of Habit, David T. Courtwright announces his intention to "do for drugs what William McNeill did for diseases in Plagues and Peoples." The comparison is a helpful one, for it is suggestive of the scale and promise of the work. Like McNeill' s study of global disease patterns and their impact on world history, Courtwright's work covers vast stretches of time and space. In whatever might be called "drug" history, much of what passes for "comparative" or "global" is merely the parallel and poorly integrated work of scholars divided by drug and country--tea in Britain, opium in China, amphetamines in Sweden. Courtwright, in contrast, offers what might be called a master narrative of drugs in modern world history. Forces of Habit presents an extraordinary compilation of research on all manner of illicit and licit substances, crossing all manner of boundaries in the process--pharmacological, national, and disciplinary. The result is what will no doubt become the standard reference for scholars i nterested in drugs and modern society.

The comparison to McNeill, however, is not really about scale or comprehensiveness. Like McNeill, Courtwright seeks to generate a master analytic framework by which historical experience might be understood and explained. Rather than the spread of disease, the key issue here is explaining how and why some psychoactive substances became global commodities, while others did not. Viewing drugs as commodities is helpful, for it brings into play the often-understudied questions of production, manufacture, and distribution, Production does matter. Without a consistent supply, there could be no crackhouses, opium dens, coffee houses or heroin shooting galleries. Echoing the work of Sidney Mintz and others, Courtwright also argues that the development of "pharmacological technology" is at bottom an issue of power. In Forces of Habit, these power elements are primarily political and economic (and largely on the level of formal structure and organization). As the author says, this is realpolitik for drugs. Some substa nces win and others lose out because of manufacturing interests, elite concerns, or national priorities. With an eye on contemporary policy debates, the argument seems to be that there is no point wasting rime bemoaning the hypocrisy of legal cigarettes and illegal cannabis--the system possesses its own logic, and it has little to do with rational balancing of pharmacological cost and benefit.

The final step in the comparison with McNeill is the most critical--to what extent are drug and epidemics not merely worth studying in similar ways, but are actually similar phenomena? Courtwright makes the case that patterns of drug use may well be akin to disease patterns. Toward that end, the author appears very much influenced by the work of psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who posited that drugs could be thought of as germ-like pathogens that could induce destructive drives in anyone and whose patterns of use had a natural geometric progress. Courtwright does not fully embrace Bejerot, but in defining his differences it seems to be the latter part of the theory that he does not like. Drugs may be akin to germ-like pathogens but they don't affect everyone in the same way. Some have "inborn characteristics that confer immunity" while "young, single, undersocialized urban males who lack genetic or cultural protections and who are already using other drugs are on the A-list of susceptibility." (p.97)

This is an argument that social historians may find troubling. Issues of individual agency and decision making seem very far in the background. Courtwright concedes that, for some, drug use is about the "intensification of individuality" (Baudelaire's evocative phrase, cited by the author), but this is regarded here as the exceptional case. The argument is largely demographic, built around the notion of susceptibility. Implicit is the idea that individuals possess only a narrow range of choices. Drugs may be used as a "consolation" or a "coping mechanism" by peasants and workers to escape from lives of toil and misery. The consumer may also be a dupe, the victim of exploitation by powerful interests. The latter formulation seems to be not very far removed from the Progressive view that few people fell from the path without being led. None of the core concepts--proximity, susceptibility, coping, or being duped--allow for close investigation of drug consumption and setting-specific social utility.

While consumers as individual decision-makers are not given their due in Forces of Habit, there is a mixed result at the collective level. Couttwright's use of "culture" is, oddly enough, most effective when he explains the op position to certain forms of drug use. He effectively argues a point that many other scholars have missed--that anti-drug movements over time have drawn considerable strength from deeply felt (not drug-specific) cultural beliefs about intoxication, pleasure, and consciousness. As a way of explaining consumption patterns, however, this work more often dismisses culture as a critical factor. Coffee rose to prominence in North America not out of any cultural reaction to tea consumption, but because coffee was cheap and readily available. Likewise, the drug counterculture of 1960s America is described here mostly a product of demographics. The implications of the "countercultural" idea are left unexplored, while American youths traveling the world are characterized as "potential vectors of drug use." Drugs may indeed be "fashion-proof" as the author puts it, in the sense that they remain pharmacologically consistent, but the meanings of use must surely change over time. To be sure, Courtwright concedes that this is so, but the work will frustrate those looking for broader cultural analysis.

Whatever arguments may be prompted by Courtwright's analysis, his ambitions have made this a most impressive study. For the growing numbers of scholars investigating the social history of drugs, Forces of Habit should be required reading.